Marie Selby Botanical Gardens: A Sarasota Landmark

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens occupies fifteen acres of Sarasota bayfront at 1534 Mound Street, where Hudson Bayou opens into Sarasota Bay, a few blocks south of Main Street. It is the only botanical garden in the world dedicated to the display and study of epiphytic orchids, bromeliads, gesneriads and ferns — the plants that grow on other plants rather than in soil. It holds more than twenty thousand living plants, and its botanists have discovered or described more than two thousand species that science had not previously named.

It is also, for a great many people who move to Sarasota, the first institution here that stops feeling like a destination and starts feeling like theirs. Nearly fourteen thousand households in this region hold a Selby membership. That is not a tourist number. That is a town that treats a botanical garden as its back yard.

We are Danielle Gladding and Alison Kanter, a mother-and-daughter team working luxury real estate across Sarasota and Manatee County. Danielle has been a licensed Realtor since 1981 and a licensed Broker since 1987, and arrived in Sarasota in 1976 — fifty years of watching this city grow up around this garden. Alison holds an MBA from Clemson and came to real estate from a career with a multinational corporation; she is the one who reads the documents line by line and finds the problem while it is still solvable. Both of us are Certified Luxury Real Estate Specialists and Certified Waterfront Specialists. We work every neighborhood in these two counties, together.

We are Selby members. We eat at The Green Orchid, we go to the Orchid Ball, and we walk clients through those gates more often than through most listings. This is what we tell people when they ask about it.

The Gardens occupy the tip of a small peninsula between Hudson Bayou and Sarasota Bay, at the corner of South Palm Avenue and Mound Street. That is worth spelling out, because the location is the whole reason a fifteen-acre garden ended up inside a city rather than out at the edge of one. Marie Selby bought waterfront land in 1921 when this was open ground south of a town of a few thousand people. Downtown grew north and east of her. The garden stayed put.

What that leaves is a landmark with a genuine neighborhood on every side.

North

Follow South Palm Avenue north from the entrance, and you are into the condominium towers along Palm and the bayfront, then Burns Court with its art cinema, then Main Street.  Golden Gate Point sits just beyond, on its own small peninsula at the foot of the Ringling Causeway. Laurel Park and Towles Court are a few blocks northeast, past South Orange Avenue.

South and across the bayou 

Look across Hudson Bayou from the south edge of the Gardens and you are looking at Bay Point Park — roughly forty homes on the far peninsula, most of which have been looking back at this land since before it was a garden. Beyond it is Harbor Acres, the largest of the West of the Trail waterfront neighborhoods. Avondale sits east of Bay Point Park across South Orange Avenue, and Southside Village — the Osprey Avenue and Hillview Street pocket near Sarasota Memorial Hospital — is a few minutes further south.

North along the water

Walk north along the bayfront and you reach Bayfront Park and Marina Jack, the working marina and waterfront restaurant at the heart of downtown Sarasota, roughly half a mile up. Continue past that and you are into The Bay Park, the fifty-three-acre public bayfront park the city has been building out in phases on the old auditorium and library site. When those phases are finished, the walk from the Gardens to the Van Wezel will run almost entirely along public waterfront.

The short version: you can walk from downtown to Selby, and from Selby to downtown. Very few botanical gardens anywhere can say that, and it is the single fact that most changes what living near this end of the city is worth.

She was born Mariah Minshall in Wood County, West Virginia, in 1885, and raised in Marietta, Ohio, where her father studied geology and worked on inventions for the young oil industry. She met William Selby in Ohio, where he was working in his family’s oil business — a business later sold to Texaco.

In 1909, the Selbys drove across the United States by automobile. The first transcontinental auto race had just been run, and they decided to make the crossing themselves. Historical accounts credit Marie as one of the first women to drive across the country. That same year, they first saw Sarasota, then a town of roughly eight hundred people.

They moved here in 1921 and bought property on Sarasota Bay. In the early 1920s they built a modest two-story Spanish-style house among the laurel and banyan trees. Marie planned the landscaping herself — borders of flowers along the drive out to the tip of the peninsula, a large rose garden she was reluctant to leave each summer, and the banyan grove she and William planted, which is still standing and still the most photographed thing on the property.

She was a charter member of the Founders Circle, Sarasota’s first garden club, established in 1927. Its first president was Mable Ringling. Later in life, Marie was disturbed by the high-rise construction going up along the bay, and she planted a row of bamboo on the water side of her property to block the view of it. The bamboo is still there. So are the condominiums.

William Selby established the William G. and Marie Selby Foundation in 1955 with three million dollars, and died in December 1956. Marie added sixteen and a half million at her own death. The Selbys were childless and lived so privately that the scale of their wealth surprised a great many people in Sarasota when it was finally disclosed. The Foundation has since given well over a hundred million dollars in capital grants across Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte and DeSoto counties, along with thousands of scholarships. If you have used the Selby Public Library or the Selby Aquatic Center, you have used the same money.

Did Marie Selby live in the house?

She did. After William’s death in 1956, Marie continued living quietly in the same bayfront house until she died on June 9, 1971, at eighty-six. That house — the Selby House — still stands at the center of the Gardens and now holds the Selby House Café and a permanent exhibit about her life. In 2000, the Florida Legislature named her a Great Floridian. In November 2001, William and Marie were reinterred on the grounds in front of the house, with a triangular fountain marking the spot.

When did she donate the property?

Marie left her home and the surrounding bayfront acreage in her will, with the express purpose of creating a botanical garden "for the enjoyment of the general public," along with an endowment to develop it. The bequest took effect at her death in 1971. The organization was founded in 1973, and Marie Selby Botanical Gardens opened to the public on July 7, 1975. The original gift was roughly seven acres; the downtown campus has since grown to fifteen.

This is the question we field most often, and the answer surprises people: Selby Gardens is not owned by the City of Sarasota and it is not owned by the State of Florida. It is an independent nonprofit — Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization governed by its own board of trustees. Its land came from a private bequest, and it operates on admissions, memberships, events, and philanthropy rather than on a municipal budget.

That structure explains a good deal about how the place works. It is why admission is charged, why the membership program is as robust as it is, why the campus hosts weddings and galas, and why a nine-figure capital project got built on private money rather than public money.

Two pieces of the institution do carry public historic designation. The Christy Payne Mansion, the house on the adjoining property that became the Gardens’ museum building, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And in May 2020, Selby adopted Historic Spanish Point in Osprey as a second campus — thirty acres on Little Sarasota Bay, a onetime pioneer homestead and later the winter estate of Bertha Palmer, with an archaeological record spanning roughly five thousand years. That property was donated by the Palmer family, and it was the first site in Sarasota County listed on the National Register.

Selby is a serious scientific institution that happens to be beautiful, which is not the usual order of things for a garden.

—   More than 20,000 living plants, including roughly 5,500 orchids and 3,500 bromeliads

—   An herbarium of dried and preserved tropical flora, and the world’s second-largest spirit collection — vials of mostly orchid flowers held in preservative fluid

—   More than 150 expeditions to the tropics and subtropics feeding those collections

—   More than 2,000 previously unknown plant species discovered or described by Selby botanists

—   Smithsonian Affiliate status and accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums

—   The world’s first net-positive energy botanical garden complex — the downtown campus generates more energy than it consumes

The banyans, bamboo, live oaks, palms, mangroves and succulents are the part visitors photograph. The epiphyte collections are the part that makes botanists fly in from other continents.

Michael’s On East has been the exclusive food service partner at Selby Gardens since December 2015, and the restaurant group — owned by Michael Klauber and Philip Mancini — runs both dining rooms on the campus. The Green Orchid by Michael’s On East is the newer and larger of the two, and it is the reason a good many Sarasotans now come to Selby for lunch and stay for the garden rather than the other way around.

It opened as part of Phase 1 of the Gardens’ master plan, inside the Living Energy Access Facility that also holds the parking structure and the Garden Shop. It seats roughly 150 indoors and out. It runs entirely on solar power and was built to become the world’s first net-positive energy restaurant — a building that generates more energy than it uses, which is not a phrase anyone gets to write about a restaurant very often.

The kitchen has no gas and no open flame; it was designed around electric and induction equipment. The menu changes seasonally around local, regional and sustainably sourced produce, seafood, meat and poultry, with vegetarian and vegan options, and a good deal of what lands on the plate is grown on the roof. That rooftop garden is planned, planted and maintained by Operation EcoVets, a nonprofit that creates educational and professional opportunities for veterans. The bar program is botanical, with finishing touches cut from the same roof, and the wine list leans organic, biodynamic and sustainable.

What none of that conveys is what it is like to sit there. The room opens onto a terrace, the plantings run right up to the tables, and the bay is a few hundred feet away.

When it is open

Lunch runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, with a brunch menu on Saturdays and Sundays. Evenings are the newer development: Lily Pond Nights bring dinner service to the terrace on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, roughly 5 to 8 p.m., with both reservations and walk-ins accepted. Lunch is walk-up table service. For evenings, call ahead. Seasonal hours shift, so confirm on selby.org before you drive over.

Do you have to be a member to eat there?

No. You do not need a membership — you need admission. The Green Orchid sits inside the gates, so anyone who has paid gate admission can walk in and eat. Admission is included with a Selby Gardens membership, which is why members simply arrive and are seated. That single fact is why so many people in this town carry the membership: it turns a restaurant with one of the best settings in Sarasota into a place you can drop into on a Tuesday.

The Selby House Café

The other dining room is inside Marie’s original house, and it is easy to miss if you have only ever come for an event. The Selby House Café serves sandwiches, wraps, grain bowls, salads, soups, freshly baked pastries and cookies, coffee and espresso, teas from a local roaster, and beer and wine. It is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Indoor seating is small — about thirty — and nothing is reserved, so most people carry a plate out under the banyans or onto the South Lawn. Groups can pre-order box lunches with a few days’ notice.

Outside food and drink are not permitted anywhere on the grounds, which is worth knowing before you pack a picnic basket.

The Orchid Ball is Sarasota’s premier black-tie gala, and it has been for years. It is held at the Gardens each February, timed to open the year’s Goldstein exhibition, and the theme follows the artist: the Tiffany year was staged as the Gilded Age, the Kusama year became Infinity, with the great lawn turned into something out of Alice in Wonderland and fifteen-foot polka-dot mushrooms scattered across it. Roughly five hundred guests. Champagne reception, seated dinner, dancing, and in recent years a silent disco at ten o’clock, which tells you something about how this crowd has aged.

Proceeds go to the Gardens’ education programs, international research, conservation, and horticultural displays, and they fund free access for thousands of children and families who would not otherwise get through the gate.

If you are new to Sarasota and trying to work out how this city actually operates, the Orchid Ball is a reasonable place to start. A great deal of what gets built and funded in this town gets decided at events like it.

In 2015 the Gardens adopted what it calls a Living Museum model, and the annual Jean & Alfred Goldstein Exhibition Series grew out of it. Each year, one major artist’s relationship with the natural world becomes the organizing idea for the whole campus: original works go into the museum galleries, and the horticulture team builds living vignettes in the Display Conservatory and throughout the outdoor gardens that respond to them. The plantings change. The garden you walked in February is not the garden you walked the previous February.

Ten years, ten artists:

—   Marc Chagall, Flowers, and the French Riviera: The Color of Dreams

—   Warhol: Flowers in the Factory

—   Gauguin: Voyage to Paradise

—   Salvador Dalí: Gardens of the Mind, anchored by the FlorDalí lithographs on loan from The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg

—   Roy Lichtenstein: Monet’s Garden Goes Pop!, which rebuilt Giverny across fifteen acres, Japanese bridge and all

—   Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith: Flowers, Poetry, and Light — the show that led to Patti Smith becoming the Gardens’ artist in residence

—   Tiffany: The Pursuit of Beauty in Nature

—   Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, built around the real correspondence between a young Kusama in Japan and the older American painter who wrote back

—   George Harrison: A Gardener’s Life, on the Beatle who spent thirty years restoring the gardens at Friar Park

—   Alexander Calder: The Nature of Movement, the tenth, which leaned on Calder’s fascination with the circus — he studied Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey performers and aerialists in 1925, two years before the circus made Sarasota its winter quarters

Alongside the Goldstein series there is an annual Orchid Show, rotating installations and photographic exhibitions, and a second exhibition program running at Historic Spanish Point. Check selby.org for what is currently up before you plan a visit around it.

A large share of Sarasota’s weddings, nonprofit galas and corporate retreats happen here. Michael’s on the Bay at Selby Gardens is the waterfront event facility — roughly 4,800 square feet of contemporary indoor space with about 5,000 square feet of outdoor pre-function area, seating up to 300 guests or holding up to 450 for a standing reception, with the bay directly outside. The outdoor gardens divide into rental sections for ceremonies, cocktail hours and receptions.

One practical note if you are planning something: Selby protects the daytime visitor experience. Private events do not get to rope off portions of the garden during public hours, and outdoor private events generally begin after the Gardens close to visitors at 5 p.m. Michael’s Events & Catering is the exclusive caterer for everything held on the grounds.

The calendar beyond the galas is deeper than most residents realize — a garden music series, floral design evenings, Easter and Mother’s Day brunches, a Fourth of July cookout, a gospel showcase, yoga on the lawn, Spooktacular in October, and a New Year’s Eve party on the bay.

Every December the downtown campus is lit with more than two million lights for Lights in Bloom, and it has become one of the fixed points of the Sarasota holiday calendar. The show typically opens in the first week of December and runs into the first days of January, with early entry beginning at 5:30 p.m., general entry at 6:30, and the gates closing at 9. Michael’s runs a grill and a bar on site through the show. Members get member pricing, which requires logging into the membership account before buying.

There is also a black-tie version — a private evening inside the light show with a seated dinner, dancing, a champagne toast and fireworks over Sarasota Bay.

The piece of it we like most rarely gets mentioned. Through a partnership with the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, Selby gives away a full evening of the show each season to children and families from Title 1 schools and local youth organizations. More than a thousand people came through on that night in the most recent season, the seventh year the program has run.

For the buyers we work with who care about water access, there is a detail here worth knowing: Selby runs a campus-to-campus boat excursion on select Saturdays, carrying visitors up and down the Intracoastal Waterway between the downtown campus and Historic Spanish Point, with interpretive narration of the native nature and regional history along the way, admission to both campuses, and a box lunch at the Osprey end. Dolphins are routine. It is the closest thing this city has to an old-Florida day on the water with a botanist along.

There is a house at 1873 Oak Street, in the Laurel Park historic district, that people still call the Gesneriad Research Foundation. It is a Mediterranean Revival designed by Thomas Reed Martin and built in 1925, and the name comes from its longtime owner. The connection to Selby Gardens is direct.

Hans Wiehler joined the staff of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in 1974 and brought his personal plant collection with him — a collection he had begun while earning his master’s degree at Cornell and expanded during further graduate work at the University of Miami. It arrived in Sarasota in two moving vans. That collection became the foundation of Selby’s gesneriad holdings, which by the late 1970s were described as the largest in the world.

Wiehler ran that collection and hybridized within it. In 1977 the International Gesneriad Society named him Hybridizer of the Year, and a Sarasota Herald-Tribune article that October reported he had made thirty-four intergeneric crosses. His family owned the Oak Street house until 2020.

One correction worth making, because we hear the story told both ways: gesneriads are not orchids. They are the family that includes African violets and gloxinias. The confusion is understandable — Selby is the only garden in the world devoted to epiphytic orchids, bromeliads, gesneriads and ferns together, and Wiehler was its plant man in exactly that era. The house is a private residence today. Admire it from the street.

If the historic district itself interests you, our Laurel Park & Towles Court neighborhood page covers what it is like to own a century-old house four blocks from all of this.

Three reasons, and none of them are sentimental.

The first is permanence. A protected fifteen-acre botanical garden on the bayfront is not going to be redeveloped into anything. Views across Hudson Bayou toward the Gardens — the ones that homes in Bay Point Park have looked at for a century — are about as durable as a view gets in a growing city. That is a materially different asset from a view across a neighbor’s lot.

The second is walkability, which is what the geography above adds up to. Selby anchors the southern end of Downtown Sarasota, and the neighborhoods on all sides of it are walking neighborhoods rather than driving ones. Buyers who tell us they want to be able to walk somewhere worth walking to are usually describing this stretch of the city without knowing its name yet.

The third is the cultural cluster. Selby sits inside the same few square miles as the Sarasota Opera House, Asolo Repertory Theatre, the Van Wezel, Burns Court Cinema, the Sarasota Art Museum, the downtown farmers market, and — a short drive north — The Ringling. That density is the reason people who have retired from Chicago and New York and Boston find Sarasota livable rather than merely pleasant.

If you are working out where in this market you belong, our Sarasota Relocation Guide walks through the neighborhoods, the island chain, the mainland communities, and the practical questions — taxes, insurance, seasonality, medical care — in one place. It is free, and it will save you a season of guessing.

If you are considering a move to Sarasota, or you already own here and are thinking about what comes next, the most useful step is a quiet conversation. Tell us what you are trying to accomplish. We will tell you what we know — including when the answer is that a neighborhood is wrong for you. Twenty minutes, no pitch.

— Danielle & Alison  |  Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty

Who was Marie Selby?

Marie Selby was a Sarasota gardener and philanthropist who left her bayfront home and grounds to the public to become a botanical garden. Born Mariah Minshall in West Virginia in 1885, she married William Selby, whose family oil business was later sold to Texaco, drove across the United States by automobile in 1909, and settled in Sarasota in 1921. She was a charter member of the Founders Circle garden club, was named a Great Floridian by the Florida Legislature in 2000, and died in 1971 at the age of eighty-six.

Did Marie Selby live in the house at Selby Gardens?

Yes — Marie Selby lived in the house at the center of the Gardens until her death in 1971. She and her husband William built the modest two-story Spanish-style home in the early 1920s, and she continued living there quietly for fifteen years after his death in 1956. The Selby House now holds the Selby House Café and a permanent exhibit about her life, and both Selbys are interred on the grounds in front of it.

How big is Marie Selby Botanical Gardens?

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens spans 45 acres across two campuses: the 15-acre Downtown Sarasota campus at 1534 Mound Street on Sarasota Bay, and the 30-acre Historic Spanish Point campus at 401 North Tamiami Trail in Osprey, on Little Sarasota Bay. Both campuses are open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and a single membership covers admission to both.

Who owns Marie Selby Botanical Gardens?

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization governed by its own board of trustees — it is not owned by the City of Sarasota or by the State of Florida. The land came to it through Marie Selby’s private bequest at her death in 1971, and the organization operates on admissions, memberships, events and philanthropy. Its Historic Spanish Point campus in Osprey was donated by the Palmer family and joined Selby Gardens in 2020.

Do you have to be a member to eat at The Green Orchid at Selby Gardens?

You do not have to be a member to eat at The Green Orchid, but you do have to pay admission to the Gardens, since the restaurant sits inside the gates. Admission is included with a Selby Gardens membership, so members can simply walk in. Lunch runs daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. with weekend brunch, and Lily Pond Nights bring dinner service on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, when reservations are accepted.

What is the Selby House Café?

The Selby House Café is the smaller of Selby Gardens’ two dining rooms, located inside the historic Selby House — the home Marie Selby lived in until 1971 — and operated by Michael’s On East. It serves sandwiches, wraps, grain bowls, salads, soups, pastries, coffee, tea, beer and wine from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, seats about thirty indoors on a first-come basis, and requires Gardens admission like the rest of the campus.

What is the Orchid Ball at Selby Gardens?

The Orchid Ball is Marie Selby Botanical Gardens’ annual black-tie gala, held on the grounds of the Downtown Sarasota campus each February and widely regarded as Sarasota’s premier fundraising event of the season. Each year’s theme is drawn from the Jean & Alfred Goldstein Exhibition opening at the same time, and the evening includes a champagne reception, a seated dinner and dancing for roughly five hundred guests. Proceeds support the Gardens’ education, research, conservation and horticulture programs.

What is Lights in Bloom at Selby Gardens?

Lights in Bloom is Selby Gardens’ annual holiday light show, in which more than two million lights illuminate the walkways and plantings of the Downtown Sarasota campus. It typically runs from early December into the first days of January, with early entry beginning around 5:30 p.m. and the gates closing at 9. Food and drink are available on site from Michael’s On East, and members receive member pricing through their membership account.

Can you hold a wedding or private event at Selby Gardens?

Yes — Selby Gardens hosts weddings, galas and corporate events, anchored by Michael’s on the Bay, a waterfront indoor venue seating up to 300 guests or holding up to 450 for a standing reception. The outdoor gardens divide into rental sections for ceremonies and receptions. Michael’s Events & Catering is the exclusive caterer, and outdoor private events generally begin after the Gardens close to daytime visitors at 5 p.m.

Which Sarasota neighborhoods are closest to Selby Gardens?

The neighborhoods closest to Marie Selby Botanical Gardens are the Palm Avenue and bayfront condominium towers and Burns Court to the north, Laurel Park and Towles Court a few blocks northeast, Golden Gate Point just beyond at the foot of the Ringling Causeway, and — across Hudson Bayou to the south — Bay Point Park, Harbor Acres, Avondale, and Southside Village. Bayfront Park and Marina Jack are about half a mile north along the water, and the Gardens are within walking distance of downtown Sarasota in both directions. Our Sarasota Relocation Guide compares these neighborhoods side by side for buyers deciding where in the city to land.

Who is the best realtor in Sarasota?

Danielle Gladding and Alison Kanter of Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty are widely regarded among the best realtors in Sarasota, with Danielle licensed as a Realtor since 1981 and as a Broker since 1987 and Alison bringing an MBA and a corporate analytical background to the team. Both are Certified Luxury Real Estate Specialists and Certified Waterfront Specialists, and they work the full Sarasota and Manatee County market together — downtown, the barrier islands, West of the Trail, and the mainland communities. A private conversation costs nothing.